you see these photos and they're black and white with a harsh flash, probably desaturated in photoshop or shot with a yashica t4 or something, and it's a photograph of a girl laughing and some skateboard on the ground and the flash means that the background drops away into black more than quickly, and the punctum (if there is one) for you is probably more than anything the gradient of this dropping-away that happens at the upper edge of the photograph, and also the thin layer of shadow that follows the curves of a pant leg or a hand and makes you think 'space' or 'emptiness' -

and what's this? what's it to know that the circles you are in and the friends you take and the people you interact with are at there sincerest, most sincere, trying for themselves and making things to make things, but that this becomes exported out into this aesthetic found and followed as an imitation of the byproducts of following this interest? maybe you live in a warehouse, or you laugh on top of rooftops, or you bike around in the cold, or your friend's bartending in chinatown. sure. "export" is this funny word, and by funny I mean sinisterly appropriate, because what starts as idea and becomes followed through with effort often turns into product (which isn't bad at all) and becomes fetishized into something else. perhaps the space, step, gap, delay between product and fetish is where everything happens, this is the battleground of us versus us where there are no such things as victories or losses but just distributions, leanings, border patrol guards.

if anything the byproduct of doing a lot of design work is that these things become much more transparent all the time; the immaculate presentation of a product hinges on the subtle alignment of images on a grid, or the forms of a typeface and their thickness, size, geometry. so-called elegance and put-togetherness comes from an indesign page and can sprout from that and only that. there is this remarkable, incredible accessibility to the tools of elegance-creation that is so very one-sided, and this one-sidedness is both what design exists in pursuit of and supports, a one-sided fetish, a pop-up facade that nobody on one side believes to be anything other than a facade and that most everybody on the other side conceives as a relative structure. of course that's how it is.